1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information sharing method, an information sharing system, and an information sharing server for sharing, among mobile terminals, information relating to an information transmitting medium in which is embedded a radio tag, which can be represented by an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag.
2. Description of the Related Art
Radio tags, of which RFID tags are representative, transmit by radiowaves information that has been written into these radio tags. Recently, a wide variety of technologies have been disclosed that use radio tags.
As one example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 269508/2002 (hereinbelow referred to as Patent Document 1) discloses a technique in which a radio tag, in which a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for directing inquiries is written, is embedded into a poster for advertising a movie or article. In addition, Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 324021/2002 (hereinbelow referred to as Patent Document 2) discloses a technique for embedding into an advertisement a radio tag in which is written the URL of a server that provides relevant information (detailed content of the advertisement). These techniques have the advantage of allowing the owner of a mobile terminal that receives the URL from the advertisement to use the URL to access the Internet home page and thus obtain information regarding the advertisement.
Patent Document 2 further discloses a technique in which positional information such as the latitude and longitude or the address of the location where the advertisement is provided is written into a radio tag that is embedded in the advertisement. This technique has the advantage of enabling the owner of a mobile terminal that is located in the vicinity of the location in which the advertisement is posted to obtain positional information from the radio tag.
However, there is a demand from owners of mobile terminals who wish to use the radio tag that is embedded in an advertisement to not only obtain relevant information or positional information regarding the advertisement but to also share the acquired information with other owners of mobile terminals.
If the above-described demand were realized, the owner of a mobile terminal would be able to inform the owner of another mobile terminal of his or her own current positional information, and would therefore be able to, for example, inform his or her family at home of his or her own current location when returning home. In addition, the owner of a mobile terminal would be able to share with the owner of another mobile terminal information regarding a movie or article, and would therefore be able to, for example, make a plan to go to see the movie or make a plan to purchase the article.
However, the techniques that are disclosed in Patent Documents 1 and 2 assume that only the owner of a mobile terminal will use the relevant information or positional information of an advertisement, and as a result, do not take into the consideration the sharing of the information that is obtained from the advertisement with the owner of another mobile terminal and therefore cannot meet the above-described demands of owners of mobile terminals.
From the standpoint of service providers that provide services to mobile terminals, on the other hand, there is a desire to collect the positional information of mobile terminals and information of advertisements that have been accessed by these mobile terminals in order to learn what sort of places the owners of these mobile terminals go and what sort of advertisements they notice. Such information would allow service providers to offer services that are useful to these owners.
However, it is assumed that communications common carriers have currently taken the lead in collecting the positional information of mobile terminals, and service providers therefore collect the positional information of mobile terminals by using positional information providing services that belong to the communications common carrier. As a result, the positional information that is collected by service providers by means of the positional information providing services of the common carrier is not necessarily suited to services that are offered by the service providers. In addition, service providers, by using a positional information providing services belonging to a communications common carrier to collect positional information, are compelled to pay a high price to collect positional information.